I'll get into the big stuff that was included in this push in a bit, but the littler things include:

* Making it possible for you to customize the colors of the navstrip across your journal in all layouts, including layouts that style the navstrip as part of their design. You can pick your navstrip colors on the Display tab of Customize Journal Style: to set custom colors, check the "Use custom colors on this journal" box and pick the colors you'd like to use, then save your changes.

* Make your light/dark preference for navstrip colors follow you as a viewing preference, not follow the journal you're looking at. So, if you've set the navstrip to light or dark gradients, the navstrip will always appear to you in those colors, no matter what journal you're looking at. (I originally said that custom colors would follow you, too, but I was corrected!)

* Making the new beta icon browser remember your preferences for how you'd like to see your icons, so you only have to tell it once that you want to see small icons vs full-size icons, or meta text/no meta text.

* Fixing a problem that was letting tags get put into the database with a trailing space on the end, so if you accidentally hit the spacebar when typing your tag, "cats" could be "cats " instead. (We're still pondering how to best clean up anything that got saved that way, but if one of your tags has that problem, rename it to the version without the space.)

And, of course, the usual slew of backend fixes, tiny improvements, documentation updates, new themes, and tweaks to existing themes for better display.

One thing of note: With this push, we fixed a bug with the Edit Profile page that caused some security settings to be showing incorrectly: when selecting "everyone" as the "who can see this" security for your Location, then saving the page, visiting the page again caused the drop-down setting to show "Access List Only". Nothing was exposed that shouldn't have been exposed -- if you'd selected Access List Only as your location's security, the system respected that, and if you'd selected Everyone as your location's security, it was displayed to everyone even though the Edit Profile page showed 'Access list only' in the dropdown. (And the fix didn't change anyone's settings, just how those settings were showing.) But since there's a chance someone with their location's visibility set to 'everyone' wanted to change it to 'access list only', visited the page, saw 'access list only' in the dropdown, and thought they'd already made the change, we are recommending that everybody take a second and go doublecheck all your profile's security settings to make sure they're set to what you're comfortable with.

More in the Family

Our big non-development news this week is an addition to the Dreamwidth family. zarhooie, who's been working as one of our volunteer support team leads since the days of open beta, is joining us part-time as technical support staff, troubleshooter, and wrangler of broken things. You may have already seen her official-journal persona, misskat, kicking ass and taking names around the support board and taking care of updating people about problems in dw_maintenance.

We're really thrilled to have Kat on staff, and I'm personally really excited about having Somebody Else on whom to pawn off troubleshooting busted stuff so I don't have to do it. (Kidding! Really!)

JQuery Beta

As we've mentioned a few times before, we're in the process of updating all the Javascript we use, site-wide, to use the more-modern (and better-supported) JQuery library. This gives us a number of major wins: accessibility, device portability, cross-browser support, and (most importantly) a well-tested library used by a ton of people everywhere who are all catching and reporting bugs, giving us the benefit of a lot of Internet-wide troubleshooting and development.

We've been this damn close to taking the update out of beta a few times, only to be stymied by minor but irritating problems each time. fu has done a bunch of work with the reported bugs and glitches, though, and even though we've called "last call" a few times already, we really mean it this time.

So, if you've reported a problem before (or even if you just want to confirm that things will be OK when we switch over): go to the Beta Features page and enable the first of the three beta tests, labelled "New JS on Journals". If you run into any problems, report them in the dw-beta roundup.

Icon Page in Your Journal Style

YOU GUYS NO REALLY THIS IS SO AWESOME.

With this code push we were able to enable something we've been working on for a really long time: you can now view your icon page (http://denise.dreamwidth.org/icons for instance) in your journal style, not only in the site skin.

To enable this, go to the Display tab of the Manage Settings page. Checking the "Journal Icons Style" checkbox will set your own icon page to journal-style unless a logged-in viewer has overridden it. The "Icons View Style" setting will let you pick how you want to see others' icon pages: in the site skin, in your own style, in the journal owner's style, or in "light mode".

This will work in all of the official Dreamwidth layouts. Turning it on for journals that are using custom Dreamwidth layouts that override the layout's style sheet will work, but may look odd. (You'll need to add in the CSS styling for the icon page to make it work.) Turning it on for journals that are using custom imported layouts or layouts based on the core1 version of the S2 templating language won't work: the icon page will continue to show in site skin. (You'll need to switch to a Dreamwidth-native layout to have it work, or add in support for the icon page in the imported layout.)

Massive, massive credit for this goes to exor674 for her work on the backend support, to ninetydegrees for her work on frontend styling for our initial system styles (with a massive 59 patches), and to momijizukamori for her work on additional styles that were submitted in between the time we started the work and the time we finished it.

Charitable Giving

Last month we announced our December charitable giving program, tied to our December income: 5% of our gross income from December would be donated to the Ada Initiative, and 5% would be divided among other nonprofit organizations doing awesome work.

Results are in, and we will be donating $2380 to the Ada Initiative, and another $2380 how y'all see fit. We've picked four nonprofit organizations we'd like to donate to -- two technical, and two non-technical. We'll let the poll run for at least until Wed 16 Jan, and then divide up the donations. Each organization will get at least a $100 donation, and the remaining $1980 will be divided based on voting percentages. (So, if one organization gets 10% of the vote, they'll get $298: the $100 each organization gets, plus $198 as 10% of the remaining pool of money.)

Heifer International: "Heifer International's mission is to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the Earth. [...] By giving families a hand-up, not just a handout, we empower them to turn hunger and poverty into hope and prosperity."

The Wikimedia Foundation: "Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. [...] Wikimedia strives to bring about a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."

Choosing just one from the list is tough, I know! (Which is why we're kicking the final disposition to y'all.) But give it some thought, and then cast your vote:

This poll is closed.
This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 927

Which charity would you like to vote for?

Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières412 (44.4%)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation254 (27.4%)

Heifer International177 (19.1%)

The Wikimedia Foundation84 (9.1%)

Community Promotion

It's been a while since we've done a round of this! There are a ton of awesome, interesting, active communities on DW. If you've got a favorite that you think people would enjoy -- whether you're an admin or a community member -- tell us about it in the comments: what it is, why it's special, what you enjoy about it, why others should join it, etc.

We love seeing all the amazing things people use DW for, and we think a new year is a great time to celebrate all the wonderful things going on.

*

That's it from us for another update! As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion.

no subject

I'm not official, but that pretty much always happens when there's a dw_news post. The notification of the new post here clogs up the servers for a while and comment notifications get stuck in the queue. It should almost certainly fix itself if you wait a little while.

Community promotion

sg1_debrief is brand new here and will have information in newsletter form about Gateverse related things posted on Dreamwidth. They will subscribe to your journal if you tell them that you sometimes post about the Stargate shows.

no subject

We run the deleted-account-purging script irregularly, because removing deleted accounts causes system load and can lead to other problems. There's no planned schedule: we do it when load allows and when we have the tiem & attention to 'babysit' any problems that might crop up! So I can't guess as to when it might be, but we do try to do it every few months.

Community promotion - we've made DW our home base as of Jan 2013!

Do you remember Kids Incorporated? Do you love 80s-flavor nostalgia? Then this is the place for you!

We've set up this community to deliver your daily dose of Kids Incorporated cheer. Each day, a new picture or video relating to the show will be posted, something that will hopefully bring a smile to your face and a song to your heart! =)

Discussion is welcome and encouraged! Does the pic or vid stir memories? Or do the cast members just look goofy? Don't be afraid to give us your opinion! =)

Community Promotion

Do you find it easier to make creative fanworks in a community setting? Do you like deadlines? Have you longed for a space where you can stretch yourself, experiment and play in different fandoms or media?

fan_flashworks is an all-fandoms, any-media flashworks comm. Three challenges per month, no sign-ups, regular amnesties.

Re: Community Promotion

Community promo! :-)

vaginapagina is the DW comm associated with VaginaPagina.com, a large and awesome community with its focus on vulvovaginal & breast health discussion - as a safer space. We've been going for more'n ten years (!) at this point, and I rocked up and stuck around because finding somewhere I could talk about endometriosis and about being genderqueer, and having that respected, was just awesome. :-)

Community promo!

fancake is a fan-fiction recommendations comm. What makes it different is that it is (a) multi-fandom and (b) themed. Each month, there's a different theme, such as "amnesia", "crossovers & fusions", "hurt/comfort", to name a few. People post recs that match the theme; any fandom, any rating. The mods do the tagging, which makes it easier all around. There's also an associated Pinboard account, for more thorough tagging of the recs.

Re: Community promo!

no subject

Checking the "Journal Icons Style" checkbox will set your own icon page to journal-style unless a logged-in viewer has overridden it. The "Icons View Style" setting will let you pick how you want to see others' icon pages: in the site skin, in your own style, in the journal owner's style, or in "light mode".

So I can have the Journal Icons Style ticky box checked, but if I choose site skin for the Icons View Style, my own icons page is still in site skin.

I like the way you explain it better -- that I can choose the way I see my icon page, and I can choose the way I see everybody else's icon page, and it doesn't necessarily have to be the same way. Can we make that happen?

no subject

Not easily, unfortunately -- the two are handled through separate pathways and the Icons View Style has to take precedence because of complex things that are really annoying to try to explain. I know it's confusing, but we haven't figured out a way to make it less so :/ (The same thing happens with the entry view style, so we've been pondering it for a while.)

no subject

community promo!

rainbowfic is a challenge-based community for original fiction on Dreamwidth. The challenges can be explored at rainbowlists. Come on by, check things out, introduce yourself, and pick your challenges if you're so inclined. We look forward to meeting you and reading your stories!